Newsbrief: The Francis Scott Key Bridge Collapse

I see now the magic is ruined because I sort of saw the countdown out of the corner of my eye.

Yeah, you don't get right.

Now I'm just in your head.

You got stage fright.

I did.

I did.

I, you know, maybe all the years of doing this.

You don't just go piss in the middle of a live show.

Who knows?

I mean, like, Maimonides has this story of a loot player, right, who's like brought to perform before the king, perform a song he knows like a thousand, thousand times,

like the back of his hand.

And he gets up there, and not only does he forget the song, he forgets how to play the lute, lute,

like everything about it, like how to even hold it.

And yeah, that's that's what's happening to us right now, you know.

I did that in a Tim Hortons once.

You did.

Oh, so it wasn't Tim Hortons.

So it was.

I fucking told you.

Why was he trying to play the loot in a Tim Hortons?

We thought we'd have to sing for our dinner.

No, no,

I went to Tim Hortons for the first time in Quebec.

I tried to order a black coffee in French.

Oh, yeah.

And

I messed that up.

And then I also forgot forgot how to speak English.

I told people that story.

I tell people that story as Raz tried to order a black coffee in two languages and then successfully spoke neither of those languages.

Yeah.

So

one of my great memories of you is just like me and my dad being like, what the fuck is he talking about?

Don't have to, you don't.

Advice for first-time visitors to Quebec, just don't bother with speaking French.

Just don't do it.

They all speak English.

They get offended if you speak French.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And because your French is better than theirs.

That's for that.

That's like their thing.

It's the equivalent of

a white guy speaking African-American vernacular English.

Just don't do it.

I don't know that it is.

I really don't know that it is.

I do love the idea of...

of Roz going in there and just being like, you know what, I'm going to do is speak exclusively African-American vernacular English.

I'm not going to do that.

I'm not going to do that.

Yeah, I wonder what that might sound like.

I guess we'll never know.

No.

I hope we don't.

Yeah, I hope we've never learned that.

Yeah.

Oh, jeez.

The shizzle.

Please.

Oh, no.

All right.

This is a bit of an unconventional episode.

We're not going to stick to the normal format.

We're doing what, I don't know, I'm just going to call a Will Air's Your Problem news brief.

Yeah,

we've done whoops all news before.

Whoops-all news in fact let me let me hit you with the news

uh it's all news hello welcome to it's all news all the news podcast which is about news um i said odd i hate myself i'm justin rozniak i'm the person who's talking right now my pronouns are he and him okay go I'm November Kelly.

I'm the person who's talking now.

My pronouns are she and her.

WTYP action news team.

Yay Liam.

Yay, Liam.

Yeah, we're going to.

Oh, that was so loud.

right in my fucking ears, dude.

I told, are you taking allergy meds like I told you?

No,

these are the oldest, most married couple.

And the fact that, like, one of you getting married, if anything, only intensified your marriage to each other.

I just, I don't understand why you do this.

Well, no, it's what I didn't do, which is

you have allergy meds.

I will take you to the store if I have to, and I will give them to you like a baby bird.

Being friends with Liam is you receive a large amount of allergy medication and hard drives.

Yes.

Not that you know how to take it.

It's fine.

Hi, I'm Liam Anderson.

Liam McAnderson.

I keep forgetting that I changed my name.

My pronouns are he and him.

Why did you change your name?

I guess glass houses, you know?

It's not legal yet, but...

Well, I mean,

glass houses.

It's a highly illegal name change.

Oh, I'm going to change my name to Liam Rozniak.

And that's going to get real weird.

Don't do that.

He'll tell me what to do.

It's my name.

You can't have it.

We just all increment by one.

So we get to like Justin Kelly, Liam Rozniak,

and November McCanderson, I guess.

Yeah, we all have to share.

You get all the syllables.

In the future of communism, we all have to share one last name, which is Rozniak.

Comrade Rozniak, Comrade Rozniak, Comrade Rosniak.

So,

you know, usually I like to back off from directly commenting on current events because, you know, you, you, you, you're going to get stuff wrong.

We'll probably get some stuff wrong.

Like, the blood's still wet.

People aren't, like, receptive to you making jokes about it.

Like,

we're going to do the best we can as stuff comes out.

Reports may change.

This is, uh, we're going to flash a big disclaimer here.

This was recorded on April 3rd, 2024.

Don't get mad at us.

This is the baseless speculation hour.

And so, this is a disaster that, at least for

Liam and myself,

hit pretty close to home.

Yeah, we've been on this bridge.

We took 695.

I forget where we were going.

We have definitely taken it.

Why didn't we go through the tunnel?

I don't know.

Roz, we have taken so many trips together, they all blend together, man.

Right.

For all I know, we're still in Canada.

This is where the Quebec griff comes back in.

You know, you just see there in the background, like Quebecois.

This must be from when we got so drunk and dundalked that we lost a week or something.

I don't know.

Anyway,

you were in Baltimore in a fugue state.

Okay, I have been in Baltimore in a fugue state.

Let me ask you this question, Roz.

Do you remember any of spring of 2016?

No, you don't.

No, not really.

Yeah, I told you.

Anyway, so.

The Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, which spans the entrance of the Baltimore Harbor, got bonked.

Yeah,

remind me what I just said about sensitivity.

Boat 9-11 happened.

It's not a good situation.

The whole bridge went in the water.

Most people were able to get off the bridge, but there was a construction crew on the bridge, which was not in contact with the harbor master, and they were not alerted to evacuate.

So they all went in the water.

Two of them were pulled out of the water alive.

Six are missing, presumed dead.

Yeah, two factors.

Two of those bodies.

And I have seen things online that are just like, well,

they were definitely illegal immigrants, to which I say, no, I'm not going to say blank yourself because I don't want to.

Yeah,

it's like, but like, it's the dignity of human beings.

You can do better than that.

Yeah, you understand how

that's worse, right?

That is not like.

Everyone has a right to leave the job site safely and intact.

Put that on a shirt.

Yeah, and the fact that these were people whose lives were like already being devalued doesn't mean that their lives were worth less.

Kind of the opposite, right?

It means that

important to spend more time being like, it fucking sucks that these guys got like boat murdered.

So it turns out all people entitled to.

I don't love that I said boat murdered.

Dwarf Fortress Let's Play is colonizing my brain, allowing me to comment on a tragedy like years later.

You are fascinating.

So I'm neurodivergent, probably.

Yeah, so are the rest of us.

Remember that live show where they told us we all had autism?

I remember that.

We will get into

the communication failures here in a bit.

But, you know, I always like to start with some history and some context.

I thought this was going to be like Drake's Well for a second.

Yeah, no.

Yeah.

So let's look at the Baltimore harbor.

I remember this from season two of The Wire.

Oh, yeah.

So it's the harbor in Baltimore.

It's on the Patapsco River.

Watch out.

Yeah.

Over here is the inner harbor, right?

They used to have a lot of boats.

It doesn't anymore.

It's just like recreational boats.

The rest of it.

I said it was the outer harbor.

It's not actually called that.

It's just, you know, the harbor, the port of Baltimore.

Okay, but it's an actual like seaport, though.

oh yeah it's the fourth largest on the east coast i believe uh all the auto traffic comes through right they got a container terminal here they got a terminal for auto imports here there's a smaller one over here i believe um there's piers for exporting coal over here and down here um down here is a whole bunch of mostly bulk liquid exports probably petroleum petroleum products um so the stuff that's like killing the planet goes out, and then the Toyotas that are killing the planet come in.

Yes.

Well, they do export and import of vehicles here.

They send out a lot of John Deere tractors.

Over here, you got the Domino Sugar Plant.

They still get a lot of deliveries.

I believe over here, these piers are for gypsum mostly.

There's actually some old-fashioned brake bulk up here.

Over here, there's like there's a couple Navy vessels as well.

What else else do we have here?

Over here,

we have the Middle Branch Community Rowing Club, where I did regattas in high school occasionally.

Just Middle Branch Low Capsco.

Diverge into

an unrelated news item, Justin.

As a former rower, did you see that our Oxford-Cambridge boat race was derailed by massive amounts of human turds in the River Thames?

I heard about the boat race being...

I thought it was just they couldn't go in the river.

It wasn't that it was canceled.

No, they did it, and then everybody got sick.

A bunch of them got sick beforehand, and then afterwards they all got sick.

You know, I used to row on the Anacostia River in Washington, D.C.

The boathouse was above a confined sewer outflow.

Like it was literally like at the dock.

Behind the dock was where the combined sewer overflowed.

And I

fell in that river when it was raining directly into the poo,

and I was fine.

Nothing bad happened to me.

You just built different.

Meanwhile, apparently, all of these like posh kids get like one splash of eco-life.

Yeah, exactly.

They're shissing their guts out for like a week.

You know,

I just love the idea of Roz swimming through like a river of turds and just like gritting his teeth, like some sort of like army crawl.

The special forces, but it's just Roz.

Yeah, i believe it you know

this area i remember rowing over here it's very briny it's it's just unpleasant smells everywhere um what else is here uh

the ns savannah is moored here permanently

the uh the the nuclear merchant ship um

future episode i guess we'll have to do a bonus episode on like nuclear ships people have been asking for it down here sparrows point there used used to be a big steel mill.

Uh, Fort Carroll here, uh, Robert E.

Lee's other contribution to the side to society.

Uh, I like all this.

This is like the kind of like, um, this isn't even Rust Belt.

I was gonna say the Rust Belt playset, you know, yeah, comes with a bunch of different activities.

You have uh go out in Federal Hill and see your future wife blackout, eat a bunch of pasta, wake up the next morning and ask why there's no more pasta.

There's uh, there's uh a Coast Guard station down here on Curtis Creek,

some miscellaneous petroleum stuff over here, lots of barges.

I'm not exactly certain what goes on down here.

That's the extent of my knowledge of the port.

So a lot going on,

which is that, like, all of this stuff is behind, or almost all of this stuff is behind.

one bridge and then some behind three bridges which there is one bridge, which is the Francis Scott Key Bridge down here.

Gotcha.

This is the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel here.

Oh, this is the Fort Henry Tunnel here.

You know, it's almost as if it makes more sense to do a tunnel under a harbor rather than a bridge over it.

We'll get to that in a second, but yes.

So, you know, this is a big port.

Our big exports are, you know, right now it's cars, it's tractors, it's, you know, stuff like that.

It's sort of

like Baltimore called Pigtown.

If you look above the MT Bank Stadium, uh,

below and to the left of the like big Baltimore, there's there's there's

yeah, yeah, I'm

I assume I've been there a lot, I didn't know it was called Pigtown.

That's where the BNO Railroad Museum is there, BNO Railroad Museum, very, very good.

Go there, um,

but uh, yeah, so

you know, this is a big port.

It's the fourth largest on the East Coast.

It's a relatively important one.

It is, it gets some big container ships, but it also gets lots of other kinds of ships and always has.

You know, the containers are not necessarily the main thing here, although they probably have a bigger dollar value than everything else other than the cars.

You know, the containers are, the big container port is still Port of New York and New Jersey.

So, anyway, you know, one of the one of the things maybe where I want to push back on some media narratives here,

one of the

some of the biggest vessels coming in here are the bulkers for coal, right?

You know, there's been a lot of talk about how ships got a lot bigger very quickly over the recent few years.

That's true of container ships.

For bulk ships, these got really big in the 1970s.

So, this ship here is called Sealander II, registered in Malta, it's 95,000 gross tons.

It's 950 feet long-ish, 150-foot beam-ish.

It's big.

It's not notably bigger than a lot of the bulkers that were coming in in the 1970s.

You know, the port of Baltimore has been seeing these really, really big ships for a really, really long time.

One of the reasons why a lot of the early crossings

were tunnels as opposed to bridges.

Because all of these like Panama, like Panamax era sort of like bulk carriers.

Oh, this is this is Suez Max.

The bulkers got bigger than the Panamax standard really early on.

Them and the oil tankers.

I guess that's kind of implied by the word bulk.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Which food, honestly, but yeah.

Same.

For the uninitiated, bulkers are designed to carry things like coal or iron ore or grain or any kind of of loose ship.

Loose, yeah, loose stuff that, you know, you can, yeah, you know, you can just put in a big pile, right?

One might say simply a big container ship full of loose cigarettes.

Yeah,

it's a container ship where the container is the ship rather than a machine.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Also, coal stored looks ugly as hell.

Oh, yeah.

Like,

maybe we shouldn't be digging this stuff out of the ground.

Well, you got to make skill somehow.

Yeah.

Oh, we're well on our way to the...

We're well on our way to not doing that anymore.

We don't do that in this country anymore, you know?

All right.

So the Francis Scott Key Bridge, this is the product of induced demand, right?

The Baltimore Harbor Tunnel opened in 1957, which is the tunnel that now carries Interstate 895 under the harbor from a neighborhood called Brooklyn.

Steel,

what the fuck?

Yeah, yeah, there's Baltimore, Brooklyn, and it goes to a big industrial area and then through Baltimore, Greektown.

Just like renaming everything in Baltimore so that it's the same as New York, but prefaced by Baltimore.

I love to call Baltimore Manhattan.

Greek Town

brackets, Baltimore.

Stavros, what are you doing here?

Yeah, yeah.

That's where he lives.

Yeah.

We're not doxing Stavros on here.

Anyway,

so I only know two people who live in Baltimore, and I can't make jokes about one of them, so it's going to have to be Stavros.

So once all these cars started cramming themselves through the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel, there was clearly an imminent need for a outer harbor crossing, right?

Sure.

So, you know, they put to tender this contract for the Outer Harbor Tunnel in 1970.

All the bids came back too high.

So it was going to be a bridge.

Is a bridge cheaper?

Bridges generally are cheaper.

You know, this is

read the power broker for a lot of discussion on this.

I don't have like an intuitive sense of which is going to be more expensive, you know.

So

it depends a lot on like the geography.

It depends a lot on or the geology.

It depends a lot on, frankly, who's building it and what era it was because there was a, you know, there were some, especially the further back in time you go, the stronger the case for the tunnel was.

But yeah,

this was going to be a big bridge.

Funding was authorized in 1971.

The Coast Guard sort of vacillated for a while on this idea because they were like, well, maybe having

a bridge that could potentially block the harbor if it were destroyed would be a bad idea.

Eventually, they acquiesced.

Yeah, I remember reading that the Coast Guard station had a like a betting pool for a while after it was built on when it was going to collapse, which some

like 1970s Coast Guard veteran has just won big.

Yeah, I was about to say.

Congratulations, what I assume is like a taunt to you at this point as well.

Yeah, you know, it starts out like a swear jar.

Pretty soon, it's the big like transparent pig from Squid Game, and a guy has just won that.

Yeah.

So they eventually approved the bridge at the very last second before the bond authorization was going to expire in 1972.

Construction began.

This was going to be the longest continuous truss span in the world with a main span of 1,200 feet.

That's, you know, between the piers here, right?

It opens up.

Very impressive.

Oh, yeah.

It's a very big bridge for its type.

I believe if it were still standing now, it'd be only the third longest in the world.

So, you know, it's a four-lane bridge.

It was built with two-lane approach roads because they didn't have money to build the whole highway out.

This is a bridge with no shoulder, no walkways, very much of a certain era where the focus is just about get the lanes in.

Get the cars out of here.

Yeah, exactly.

Gotcha.

I have personally always thought this was a very handsome bridge, though.

It was, you know, definitely a familiar landmark sort of as you're coming out of the harbor tunnel.

You can see it.

It's striking, you know, and it gives Baltimore a bit of skyline.

I don't know Baltimore well, but, you know, I can understand people being like attached to it, you know.

Yeah.

One thing I also want to note, because even mainstream big news outlets are doing this.

This is called the Francis Scott Key Bridge.

It is not called the Baltimore Bridge.

Yeah.

Right.

There's many bridges in Baltimore.

You know, they got the Hanover Street Bridge, the Curtis Creek Bridge, the Carrollton Viaduct, the Howard Street Bridge.

There's several bridges near Penn Station.

There's a whole freeway interchange on a bridge on the middle branch of the Patapsco.

You know,

it's not the Baltimore Bridge.

It is the Francis Scott Key Bridge.

It's named after the guy who wrote your national anthem question.

Yes, correct.

About seeing Fort McHenry being bombarded.

It's still there.

Yes.

Congratulations.

I do appreciate that you have the only national anthem to mention a Congreve rocket.

That's pretty cool.

Other than that, no strong feelings.

I think it's funny that they put the word free on too high a note for most people to reach.

It's impossible to say it's not a very good national anthem.

We should replace it with America the Beautiful, which was written by a lesbian socialist school teacher.

Hell yeah.

I mean, this is the thing that binds the US and the UK together is that our national anthems suck.

We have a much better one ready to go at any time, and we choose not to use it out of inertia.

Like ours is like a dirge, you know?

You watch, they'll eventually replace it with God bless the USA.

Welcome to State 51.

Sorry.

Replace it with Party in the USA.

This can't be that save USA Miley was partying in.

Would they really still say death to America if they had heard Party in the USA?

Honestly, they'd probably say it more.

I fucking hate that song.

There's a good remix of Party.

I'm not done yet.

There's a good remix of Party in the USA combined with Biggie's Party and Bullshit.

It's called Party and Bullshit in the USA, and it does kind of slap.

Now I'm done.

I can fill up sometimes some more bullshit.

I can be like, I want to hear a boy genius cover of Parsi in the USA.

Thanks.

So a continuous trust bridge.

Yes.

Right?

They look very similar to cantilever bridges.

Some of them even have like the pointy, almost suspension bridge outline.

The idea of the continuous truss is exactly that.

It's one truss section, which is spread out over four support piers here.

Yeah, the two in the middle are the major ones.

All of this is one big structure, and it's all reliant on every other part.

Yeah, as I saw one engineer put it on Twitter, the collapse of this bridge, sort of like if you and all your friends had to hold hands in a line, and then one of you gets hit by a truck going 60 miles an hour.

Yes.

You're probably going to let go of each other.

Yeah.

So anyway, it needs, especially the two in the middle support piers here.

These are the most important.

Maybe you would only have a partial collapse if one of these outer piers went down, but the whole thing is reliant on all of itself to stay after.

It's got like two glowing weak points.

Yeah.

As opposed to down here, this is the Commodore Berry Bridge.

This is a cantilever bridge, right?

Which is made out of three,

two independent parts and one middle part that's dependent on both sides.

So, you know, if if there were a collapse where one of these piers were taken out, let's say this one here,

this section from about here to probably there,

that's reliant entirely on this pier.

That goes down.

Then there's a segment about here to there, which is rely, which is suspended between the two cantilevers.

That one goes down.

But over here, that would be fine.

It would just be balanced precariously on one spot.

Sort of the designated survivor.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean,

it's essentially the two long cantilever spans.

They support this middle segment, which is supported just at the base here.

Somewhere up here, there are some pretty hefty looking structural members, which are actually entirely aesthetic at both ends.

You know, that

exactly.

It's like,

shouldn't there be a beam there?

Nah, you don't need one.

But we put one anyway to reassure people.

I like a bit of like psychological engineering.

I like the thing to be built with the appearance of like solidness.

Well, it's like the

Firtha Fourth bridge,

which is built specifically to look strong as well as be strong.

Yeah.

It's

projecting things.

Yeah, but these cantilevers, they can be a bit longer than a continuous truss can.

just because you know you're you're you're cheating a bit by having that middle span there

um

but those are that's the basic differences there.

This thing is entirely reliant on every part of it to be to stand.

And this one, you can have a partial collapse, which will still be very bad.

Yeah, but this one, the whole thing stands or falls.

Yeah.

Gotcha.

So

let's talk about the boats.

I've heard of these.

Yes.

Sort of the concept of

the Panama Canal.

We all know it exists for a long lot of time.

At time of recording, there's some problems there.

Turns out it needs water to operate the locks, and it turns out they're not getting enough of it because of climate change.

So,

you know,

watch this space, I guess.

Probably should have thrown some pipes in there so you can reuse the lock water for drinking water.

Hindsight is 2020.

Tasty, tasty.

You could really taste the bilge.

It comes out of the lake anyway.

Yeah, but I don't, I don't want...

We could...

Did you see the fake email we got?

It goes through a water treatment plan.

God damn it.

Just let us have our bunker oil jokes and be done with it.

I clearly wanted to say bunker oil.

The fact that I restrained myself to get to like bilge water is, you know,

improving.

Yeah.

I'm so proud of you.

Thank you.

Okay, so we should at least talk briefly about container ships, how they got so big.

They got so big because they expanded the Panama Canal in 2016.

Suddenly, all these old Panamax container ships, which are the largest ships that could fit through the old locks,

those are out of fashion.

The new Neo Panamax ships are in because you could move more containers with the same crew.

This higher value merchandise that's in containers, it prefers to travel on the most direct route.

So suddenly, if you're like, I can fit more containers through the Panama Canal on a bigger ship, I'm going to instantly move to bigger ships, the biggest ships possible.

Sure.

On the other hand, again, the port of Baltimore saw a lot of bulk ships.

And since coal doesn't go bad,

those got really big pretty early on.

And stayed big.

And stayed big, yes.

Same thing with oil tankers.

In fact, oil tankers have actually started getting smaller again.

Hey, we finally hit peak oil tanker.

Yeah.

But one of these modern Neo-Panamax ships, Neopanamax being the standard for the new LOX, as opposed to the old LOX,

was the MV Dali.

When you say was, the ship's fine, right?

Well, the ship is mostly fine, yeah.

You just like, you know, drag it back out, paint it, maybe change the name.

You're going to have to, you're probably going to have to do some pretty heavy repairs, actually.

Put a new bow on it.

It's fine.

So MV Dali is named for

Salvador?

Yes.

Really?

Seriously?

Yes, it has a sister ship named the Cezanne.

I mean, I guess you've got to name them something.

Yeah.

It's better than like fucking Empire Lodmaster 27 or whatever.

The SS Turbo Hitler, yeah.

Yes.

I think most ship names are better than the SS Turbo Hitler, especially with the SS part.

I don't ship with Hamburg lines for that reason.

So anyway, this is the ship 984 feet long.

It has 158-foot beam.

Same.

49-foot draft.

Same.

95,000 gross tons.

Same.

It can carry just under 10,020-foot equivalent units.

Oh, I can't do that.

I can carry like probably like one, I guess.

This is

quite

not quite the size of an aircraft carrier, but pretty close, right?

and it's about just under half the size of the largest container ships afloat today at least in terms of gross tonnage international shipping is so cool and by cool i mean like strange oh those boats got real big um especially if you're if you're doing the

like the post panamax specific routes those ships are

just huge

Yeah, like

the largest thing the like human endeavor has ever seen and it is there to to like bring you toyotas exactly well no that's a that's on a roro ship not a container ship no we don't bring you fucking like i don't know lego bricks we all with roro ships other

semiconductors uh

what else goes in containers everything

transport fever no no it it

but everything in transport fever doesn't go in containers it just happens to in the game um

it's kind of fucked up that there's no like reason yeah anyway no no no no what what goes in containers it's finished consumer goods

all of my tree

yeah the tree yeah exactly it's full of vacuum cleaners

or

all the all the shit you ordered on aliexpress is in there sex still those

my john's bow nas case yeah

commemorative like model uh cfl helmets i i don't know yeah every time you see a full container ship you should realize that everything on there is going to be thrown out in like two years

Not my John's Bow and one mini ITX NAS chassis ITX computer, case 5 plus 1 disc base staff video loop with steel plate case built-in 14 centimeter fan, only SFX power bite

support H70 millimeter CPU cooler.

Okay, not everything on the container ship is finished consumer goods, but it's it's it's sort of a uh it's sort of the stuff that you goes in containers is stuff that you know is usually a little bit higher value merchandise.

It's not like um you know bulk products or anything like that.

Usually it's TVs.

It's these trafficked humans.

There is, for instance, Wayfair.

What are you doing?

There's one container ship that goes between the Caribbean and Wilmington, Delaware, which carries exclusively bananas.

And Roz, every time we see that ship, Roz has to sing the yes, we have no bananas today.

We have no.

That's what they say

when they finish unloading.

They say, yes, we have no bananas.

We have no bananas today.

Baltimore PD's missing surveillance fan is on one of these.

That's probably on there.

Lots of stuff goes on these, but the things it sort of has in common is it's stuff that makes sense to transport in containers, which, you know, is not like,

I don't know, sand, for instance.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Sometimes you're just transporting the empty containers somewhere because a lot of times there's an imbalance.

uh between like asia and the west coast you have to

have the container shortage to that.

Yeah, it's like, well, there's plenty of containers.

They're just not where they're needed.

No one wants to send a ship full of empty containers, but eventually you got to do it.

Who owns the containers, by the way?

Is the answer as simple as the like five shipping companies printed on the side?

Yes.

Okay, cool.

Sometimes there's like weird leasing arrangements.

There's like all the money.

It's real weird with rail cars.

That's a weird one.

So like Maersk or whatever owns like 9 billion metal boxes.

Yes.

Cool.

And so, you know, the ownership of the ship is a little more complicated.

This ship was delivered in 2015.

It was flagged in Singapore.

It was owned by a company called Grace Ocean Private, but it was operated by Marine Synergy Group, and it was chartered by Maersk.

Gotcha.

Least complicated sort of

maritime arrangement.

Yeah, this is that's actually relatively straightforward.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's weird.

I just

forgot letters of credit in a previous life for this exact thing.

And it got real fucking weird in a real fucking hurry.

I bet.

Yeah, and as for like, okay, the crew was all Indian.

Still is all Indian because they're still stuck on the ship.

We'll get to that in a few minutes.

That sucks.

Yeah.

I guess it's the reverse of the Beirut port explosion where you're like trapped on your own ship after the disaster rather than before.

Yes.

And

Singapore, not exactly a flag of convenience.

Those guys are a little strict about this stuff.

This is not like

a

super fly-by-night operation, even though

it is a complex ownership

structure.

This is not like

Bob's shipping company that exists to own one ship.

Yeah, it's commercial, so they're going to try and get the edges and cut the corners where they can, but like it's not cowboys.

Yeah, it's at some point you own something this big, you have to be at least a little above board.

Well, literally, so to speak.

Right.

So

make a long story short, because there's a lot of people who've covered the exact trajectory of the ship and everything down to the minute.

She's underway outside to leave the port of Baltimore early in the morning, March 26, 2024, bound for colombo in sri lanka bunch of sri lankan guys waiting on their john deere tractors tvs sex os one guy one guy there in a dirty mac and he's like just one more thing um

so around 1 30 in the morning things went wrong

yeah

um yeah i'll just do sort of a yeah due sort of a rough timeline here

from what i know

at this point what i've obviously, this is all secondhand from that.

I'm still like I'm down on the ground reporting.

Yeah, you're like bothering the NTSB guys, you know?

Yeah, exactly.

Hey, I got a pod to put out.

I'm pretty sure some of them listen.

Like, they must do.

Yeah.

There's got to be.

The Empire is everywhere.

Yeah.

The one thing you should know about us, we have people everywhere.

So the ship left the port.

She was assisted by tugs into the main channel.

Once they get her into the main channel, the tugs leave.

She accelerates up to a whopping eight knots.

What's that normal person?

Like nine miles an hour.

Okay.

Maybe 10.

Gotcha.

I don't know what that is in kilometers.

Who's saying Bolt could outrun this ship, but I couldn't.

You could outwalk this ship, probably.

9.20624 miles per hour.

I don't think I walk at 10 miles an hour.

Oh, well, I guess

this is going to be like a six-minute mile, Pan.

I guess.

Okay.

I could.

Our short life, I'm not going to.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, if we stacked all three of us on top of each other, we might have been with a shout out.

All three of us stacked on top of each other on a segue could outrun.

Yeah.

Right.

I just did a fun run last week.

I was forced to do it, and my pace was not exceptional.

It doesn't sound like a fun run if you're forced to do it.

That feels like a mandatory run.

Yeah, it was more of a death march.

You could out-bicycle this ship easily.

Okay, well, I, yeah,

listen, that's not hard because the bicycle is, as you keep telling me, the most efficient

means of transportation ever invented.

So

you use it with your legs.

It's like out there with like fucking some of the like nuclear fucking bypass rockets or whatever.

Ross,

we should get you a recumbent bike.

A bicycle is as energy efficient,

almost as energy efficient as a small bird, which is a highly energy efficient form of transportation.

Yeah, how do you get on top of it, though?

Right, exactly.

Well, outside of nature's laws, man.

They're about as much as

me on a skateboard with a flock of starlings all on leashes.

Yeah.

So

they're about 90 seconds out from the bridge

when

the ship loses power for reasons which have yet to be determined.

The ship is under control of a pilot, right?

And the pilot-that's the guy who flies a plane.

All right, yeah, yeah, fine, fine.

Oh,

salting snail.

I really felt like I was about to get fired in that moment.

Yeah, so here's the thing: we can't fire you.

All right.

Um, so the pilot is employed by the port as someone who's an expert in navigating vessels through

the various narrow channels that come in and out of the port, in this case,

down

the Patapsco and into the Chesapeake Bay.

And the pilot, you know, okay, we lose power.

The radio's dead.

Everything's dead.

He's no control of the ship.

We don't know everything about what exactly he was in control of and what he wasn't.

What we do know, he immediately whips out his cell phone and calls the port and says, shut down the bridge.

The correct decision taken instantly.

Instantly, yes.

Unfortunately,

I hate doing this.

I'm mad at myself for even saying it, but the cops whose job it was to get people to not go on the bridge did it.

If you ever need a cop for anything, it is to close a road, right?

Like

some of the places, I think the Northeast, they end up having to deputize some of their firefighters as cops because New York state law doesn't let a firefighter have the power to close a road, only a cop.

So some of the firefighters are like theoretical, like legal cops for that purpose only.

That's

fire police, basically.

Yeah, we have fire police.

America's simple.

We're a dumbass country, bud.

Thin blue and red line at the same time.

Thin purple line.

No, I like purple.

That's my favorite color.

Pick another one.

The harbormaster calls the

police, the Maryland state troopers, block both ends of the bridge.

You go on Twitter, you can see some pictures of people trying to drive around the blockade because they're insane.

No, no, I got to get home.

I got to get home.

I got to get home.

Yeah.

One in the morning.

Where are you going?

Where?

Where else are you going at 1 a.m.?

You're going to the bar.

There was a eight-man construction crew working on the bridge who were not in contact with the Harbormaster in any way.

They really should have been.

Also, they probably should have been.

It's so long that you can't see them like blockading it at the ends.

Right.

It's like you're on the top in the middle.

So it's like a downside.

There was not a lot of time to react here.

One of the officers actually called for backup so he could drive onto the bridge and tell the guys to get off.

Probably give that guy some kind of a medal or something.

Um, but he was still blocking the bridge.

So

if he moved, people would drive onto the bridge.

So, Sophie's choice, yeah.

Yeah,

well, quite literally, the trolley problem, right?

Like, uh, a bunch of people who are trying to drive past you to their deaths, or eight people.

Oh, it's also far from obvious how imminent this disaster is at this point.

No one can see shit, right?

Yeah, no one can see anything.

The lights on the ship are out, like, yes, it's uh, it doesn't have like any it's also far from obvious that the ship is going to immediately turn and hit the bridge.

I've seen video of this and when the lights go out, it is crazy how like invisible it is.

Even against like a it's backlit against a city.

It's like the ideal situation for it being visible and it's still just like it disappears.

Right.

I believe they do during before they hit the bridge they dropped the I want to say this is the port anchor here.

Which I don't know if that affected the trajectory of the vessel at all or I think yeah I think what what happened was they lost power one time.

They tried to do, uh, they got it back, tried to turn, um, and then lost power again with the rudder over, which turns like they can't get it back.

So the you know, kind of small turn turns into a very big turn and just like diverts it off course anyway.

So even if it hadn't been drifting, it just like it turns into it.

Yeah, exactly.

So

it uh the Dolly bonks into the south pier, um, and there's just no contest here.

The bridge immediately like the pier goes um the bridge itself rips itself apart collapses in multiple ways from multiple locations just instantly i heard right that this happened because of woke and because of dei oh i have that later in the presentation don't worry

good good um

so uh now owing to the quick thinking of the pilot the tugs that were previously assisting the ship were alerted immediately They came to the scene.

They managed to pull two of the construction workers out of the water alive.

But the rest,

again, they went in the drink and didn't come back up.

It's really cold water.

Yeah, 47 degrees, I think I read.

I couldn't.

I'm not as a normal person.

Plus, also, you know, the impact.

Yeah, SS Estonia of cold.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But yeah, so

that's what I was trying to explain to someone at work.

I was like, you have 10 minutes when you hit the water, if that, and that assumes like a best case scenario.

Yeah, that assumes that you go in and like are injured in like a survivable way and you can swim basically.

And you dodge the like bridge landing on top of you.

Yeah.

The bridge landing on top of you is a big factor here.

You also might have been sitting in your car.

Right.

Yeah.

A lot of stuff can go wrong here.

Jesus fucking Christ, man.

It sucks.

I mean, drowning in your car is like, that's one of the fucking nightmares.

Yeah,

I think we talked about this with the Tesla billionaire lately.

Yeah, no.

No, thanks.

Not a pleasant way to go.

So anyway, this ship, it also came in at an exceptionally bad angle, right?

There were a few systems in place here that may have stopped this ship, but to some extent, this was very, very unlucky.

Yeah.

And I'll go through some of those.

Here's some navigational charts.

Well, one navigational chart.

You know, how does this happen?

Is this an unavoidable freak accident?

Or are there some lessons to be learned here, right?

So we have to talk about the Baltimore Harbor Channel.

This is about 60 feet deep,

fills the whole width of the main span of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, which is about 1,200 feet.

The bridge itself was built on a budget, still nevertheless testing the limits of continuous trust bridge technology.

So any inch they could take, they used for the navigational channel, right?

But you want to give yourself like as much space as you can because it's a busy port, right?

Yes, um, you know, it was it's supposed to be designed that two ships could pass each other going under the bridge, I believe, but that very rarely happens, especially since the container ships got bigger.

Um, rather than seeing, you know,

multiple container ships a day.

Now it's like the container ship comes four times a week or something.

Now, even then, only the channel itself is deep, 60 feet deep.

Everything around it, you can see these numbers are soundings.

You know, 42, 22 feet deep, 19 feet deep, so on and so forth.

Ideally,

you know, a ship which is bound for one of the piers is going to run aground well before it reaches the pier.

It just bonks into like,

I guess, the

electricity wires up here, north of the bridge, which

are going to run aground well before you get up to here.

Yeah, because you bonk off to the side.

You perfectly like ever given Baltimore Harbor.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Running

aground is a great way to stop a big ship, but we can see that

MV Dali just managed to thread the needle in such a way so as it hit the pier before it ran aground.

Yeah.

I do like of the ways to stop a huge ship running aground is one of the like premier ways of doing it.

Yes.

There are other defense measures possible,

namely dolphins.

Oh, yeah.

Talk about the dolphins.

The sunshine skyway.

Yeah.

The thing that we all said initially in the sort of like first moments of baseless speculation is, why did it not have more of these things?

How did they fuck this up this badly?

And I do think actually

more substantial dolphins probably would have helped here.

I've gone back and forth on this because some people say, well, there was nothing you could do to stop the ship.

And other people said, well, the dolphin system should have been more substantial.

There's some interesting stuff here, though.

So the Francis Scott Key Bridge was actually one of the first bridges to be put up with big concrete dolphins, right?

It's a ship bollard.

Yes, exactly.

The ship goes, of course, it whacks into the big concrete pier instead of something that's holding up something.

Exactly.

So, you know, and these sorts of things sort of entered the public consciousness after the Sunshine Skyway Bridge was knocked down by a much smaller ship than this.

We have an episode on that.

Go watch that one.

A colleague dug up this article from the St.

Petersburg Times on May 4th, 1978,

which

favorably compared the Francis Scott Key Bridge fender system to the Sunshine Skyway.

This is actually from before the Sunshine Skyway came down.

Designer said his cells, his dolphins, which cost

$250,000 each, would stop a 200,000 ton ship doing six knots.

Yeah, it just bulks into it.

Well, it either slices into the ship and lock it there or it will divert it, right?

It's unclear here whether he's talking about 200,000 gross tons or 200,000 deadweight tons, 200,000 tons weight.

I don't know what he's talking about when he says 200,000 tons.

Ships aren't measured that way, but

probably not an encouraging sign.

Although I do like the quotes at the beginning where he says, well, should we put armor plating over houses to protect them from airplanes?

Which we kind of sort of like after plane 9-11, original classic 9-11, like

they did build a lot of buildings to try and be more like 9-11 resistant.

Yeah.

Well, I, you know, the, the, the, the World Trade Center towers did have some engineering decisions, which made them a little less plane resistant than other buildings.

That's a different episode.

Um, yeah, the 9-11 episode.

Yeah.

Where you found out that Ruth Bader Ginsburg died.

Yes.

Which we've done three episodes on.

We should really do another one.

So anyway, this is why,

generally speaking, when you talk about these systems, you don't talk about individually dolphins or individually anything.

The whole thing, what you have is a bridge fender system, right?

Which is designed to stop ships from hitting the piers.

No one technique is going to stop a huge ship dead in its tracks.

Combination of works will bleed off momentum, redirect the ship, otherwise disable it, prevent it from reaching the bridge piers.

The specific purpose of the dolphin is it takes a hard hit, right, and it starts to tear into the hull of the vessel, which in turn bleeds off the momentum,

causes the ship to slow down quickly, right?

You combine that with, while it's hitting the dolphin, it's also running aground.

generally and in the case of the sunshine skyway the new bridge they actually built an artificial island around both the main bridge piers here.

So that is also absorbing the impact before the ship reaches the actual main structure, right?

Then at this point, through a combination of these techniques, also the fact that the captain is trying to stop the ship as well, everyone involved here works together to stop catastrophe from happening.

Instead, you just have a very expensive accident

that maybe like blocks the channel until you move the ship.

Yeah, exactly.

And it causes a lot of damage to the ship, too.

Ideally, this doesn't happen at all, and the ship just goes through.

Right.

I have a futuristic solution to this.

I'm willing to sell to any port in the world for huge amounts of money.

You just have a sort of very high-powered laser either side of the navigation channel, just slices the ship apart the second it goes over it.

Easy.

That's going to kill some people.

I don't like that.

Yeah, well, I mean, so is this maybe, you know, like,

let me have my bridge lightsaber.

Yeah.

So, um, you know, this is, again, the Francis Scott Key Bridge had one of the earlier fender systems installed.

It's relatively small.

You can see it in the next image.

There is a dolphin here.

There is one over here.

Sorry, I'll be there.

There's one over here.

Let's keep going.

Okay.

Yeah, they're like really like widely spaced and it came in at a really like unfortunate angle.

Yes, yes.

So it completely missed the dolphin.

It seems weird to just have four of them is the other thing.

Like especially given the Sunshine Skyway had like, I don't know, a half dozen for each pier, it seemed like.

This is after we learned a lot.

Yeah.

You know, this, this is

just a different situation entirely because

You know, they're much larger, but they were also built in reaction to, oh, crap, this bridge collapsed um the thing is if i i i maybe i'm assuming too much sort of budget for public works here but if i had a bridge and i was in charge of that bridge i would want to keep up with like bridge news and i feel like bridge fall down because boat hit it is kind of for me as like operator of a bridge over a harbor that's something i would want to be like up to date on well ideally uh the fender system on the francis sky key bridge would have been improved after the Sunshine Skyway went down.

Yeah,

that did not happen.

Yeah, it was sort of like, well, we have a fender system.

It's not very good, but it exists.

That's way better than most other bridges at that time period.

You know, so it's, it's, it's kind of like they, they, it, it was, I guess, not at the time considered urgent to upgrade the fender system because they had one and most bridges didn't.

Sure, it's it's like I have an airbag.

Yeah.

As long as it's in, it's in like the the rear passenger offside door, but like I have one.

Yeah, so these very small, very old-fashioned fenders,

the dolphins, they're not enough to stop it.

The shipping channel goes right up to the pier, so there's not enough ground to stop it.

And the angle of attack here is very unfortunate.

So it was able to just whack into the pier.

The bridge came down.

I think it gave people a lot of like misconceptions the way it looks visually as well.

Because, um, like if you compare it to the power lines, the fenders around that look to the like, I guess, untrained observer kind of substantial.

And you're like, oh, this is substantial.

Nah, that thing, that thing is going to.

If the ship hit this, well, number one, I would have run aground first.

If the ship hit this, it would go through it like

it wasn't even there.

People look at that and they go, well, like, okay, well, clearly the reason why this didn't have those is because of woke or something.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

It's well, no, it's just an old bridge.

I mean, that was never upgraded.

I did have the thought, right?

You remember like a couple of weeks ago, Biden was in, I want to say Michigan, where he was doing the like, ooh, Earthrider, thanks to the Great Lakes thing.

But the other thing he was doing was like being photographed being like, we're going to invest in your shitty bridges, Michigan.

Maybe, maybe, I mean, stranger things have happened.

Maybe this wins him the election.

Like,

given that he is

an infrastructure guy or trying to make himself decided,

he's had a great track record on infrastructure so far.

I don't think any of those

build back better funds have even been awarded yet.

Yeah, but he's putting up the like the IRA stuff with the signs, you know.

That's a good point.

Yeah.

But so anyway, yeah, unfortunate angle.

We don't, we have no idea how well these dolphins would have would have performed because the ship didn't hit them.

Um, even, even though they're pretty small, I still think you would have probably had a situation where you were able to bleed off a lot of momentum combined with the ship running aground.

Um, you know, it might have stopped a lot more quickly, but again, we don't know.

Uh, and there's a lot of people who are still at this point debating in like both on Twitter, but also in like the news, like, would a dolphin have stopped this?

Um, the answer is just sort of there was not the combination of defenses here to stop this ship.

Um,

and that was just sort of due to the age of it.

Um, and also, uh,

I think the real thing here is:

all right,

how do you engineer to avoid the scenario happening in the first place?

Um,

if you look at other bridges and tunnels which go over major shipping lanes, um,

so for instance,

here is the Bayonne Bridge in New Jersey.

I've been miserable on this bridge.

Yeah.

The main shipping lane to the port of New York and New Jersey goes right underneath it, right?

There's a very easy way that they are able to avoid having a situation where a ship whacks into one of the piers, which is the piers are on land.

which ships cannot operate very well on.

Yeah,

one of the most effective ways of stopping a ship, land.

Yes, is land, yes.

I don't like it.

Yeah, so

that's one of the ways is you just span the full width of the channel, and then you're never going to have to worry about a ship

bonking into your bridge.

Another option we can see here, the Commodore Berry Bridge over the Delaware River,

which ships for the port of Philadelphia go in there.

Number one, it's a wider span or a longer span.

This is 1,500 feet.

Number two, the ships that go through here are smaller.

I don't think we can take the huge post-Panamax or neo-Panamax ships in Philly.

We got a smaller container terminal.

So, you know, but it's a wider shipping lane.

It's a wider channel.

It's a longer bridge.

There's more room for error.

And also, they've built up these gravel islands around the piers.

I want to say these were put in in 2008 or so.

I like the way they look.

This is the level of analysis I bring to this podcast.

I look cool.

But with a larger margin of error, the risk of collision is much lower.

Another option, of course, very popular one is do you build a tunnel.

This is the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel,

which

it's an immersed tube tunnel.

It's one of those ones where, you know, they dug a trench.

on the bottom of the harbor and then they lowered big steel tubes in there and then they covered it up and then they built a road through it.

Theoretically, a ship could hit this, but it's very unlikely.

Yeah, could get hit by a submarine, I guess.

Yeah.

You would be embarrassed as a submarine commander, I feel.

Yeah, this is true.

Yeah.

I mean, you,

oh my God, I wrapped, I wrecked my submarine on the seabed 50 feet under the port of Baltimore.

The

fucking, what's it called?

The conning tower or whatever on the submarine?

Yeah, well, a sail.

It would still be fucking above the water.

Just embarrassing at that point.

Yeah, so one great way to prevent ship collisions is to not build a bridge at all is the is the main thing.

Go around.

Just go around.

Lots of our major heavy-duty ports like Rotterdam or Shanghai or Port of Long Beach.

They just don't have crossings or those crossings are all in tunnels.

Wait, doesn't Long Beach have a massive massive bridge, though?

I remember

Los Angeles has the big bridge, and the two ports are adjacent to each other.

Long Beach does not.

Okay.

Yeah.

But you always got to consider the option of removing the safety hazard entirely before spending a lot of money mitigating it.

I also believe the Port of Los Angeles, that bridge also has the two piers on land.

Ah, smart.

Yeah.

That's thinking with the brainhead.

So I think there were some design deficiencies here, which contributed to the accident here.

You know, especially since they were originally considering building a tunnel here as opposed to building a bridge.

I mean, they sort of, you know, they were asking for it.

And event took 52 years, but they got it.

I mean, in some ways, it's a testament that it took that long, right?

That the fucking Coast Guard

betting pool on it has probably like aged out.

Yeah, that guy, that guy's probably 92 years old now.

One very happy 92-year-old Coast Guard guy.

Yeah.

So, you know, we've gone through, we did the search and rescue phase already.

Again, the two guys they pulled out of the water are the two guys who lived.

I believe they pulled out, what, yeah, two more bodies, right?

I think so, yeah.

There's still four people under the water.

We're sort of in the cleanup and salvage stage right now.

There is one fortunate thing here, which is there's a lot of marine salvage industry based on the Chesapeake Bay.

This crane is called Chesapeake 1000.

It's on the scene right now.

Oh, yeah, it's real big.

I took the train through Baltimore on Friday, and you could see this thing just looming on the horizon.

Real big.

It deployed the sort of like uh

like riverine equivalent of the bagger 288 yeah exactly i mean there's some stuff there's some of these big marine cranes you know they make the bagger 288 look like uh you know a tonka truck um

one of those giant caterpillar dump trucks i love those

so uh you know the um

you know chesapeake 1000 is on the site right now they're trying to move the wreckage out of the way this is probably going to take a month or two to clean up to get the port moving again at the time of recording there's a few small channels that have been opened up to give access for smaller vessels, but the main channel is still blocked.

You know, more psiosis,

yeah, exactly.

You're, you're, you're, all the all the big ships are still stuck in there for a long time.

A lot of this work is very nasty, it's very difficult because you know, you have divers in there doing underwater welding or underwater cutting, I guess.

The visibility is low, um, you know, because the harbor is full of silt and gnast and dick,

right?

Yeah.

And there's, uh, when you're cutting metal like this, which has been subject to, you know, these weird conditions like the bridge ripping itself apart, there's still internal stresses in the metal

which may be released by cutting it.

Yeah, you just get

perfectly flicked by a giant like I-beam or whatever.

Yes.

Yeah, exactly.

So it's, uh, it's one of these, you have to be very careful.

You have to know exactly what is going to happen before you can't just go in and cut the beams willy-nilly.

You know, because you don't know exactly what the reaction is going to be unless you have people, you know, heavily studying this thing who can say, okay, it's fine if you cut that bit or whatever.

Yeah.

Otherwise, you'd like find yourself airborne having previously been scuba diving.

Yeah, exactly.

You've been you've been sort of a you have a Looney Tune situation.

I would hate to have a Looney Tune situation.

Yes, yes.

It's not as funny in real life.

I hate to be strapped to a rocket that just says Acme on it.

And I also paid too much for groceries.

Yeah.

Now,

one of the things, whenever one of these major disasters happens, especially if it's in the United States or if it's in, you know, Western Europe,

if it's somewhere that a certain type of person considers to be the normal part of the world, you get conspiracies.

I love these.

Yeah.

I just want to say this bridge behaved exactly as you would expect almost any long-span bridge to behave when you remove a bridge pier.

You're not going to just remove a bridge pier and still have that half of the bridge hang in the air.

It's going to fall down.

Yeah, it's held up by itself.

Like we go back to the like fourth uh suspension bridge kind of like guys holding up other guys on like planks of wood with ropes or whatever thing yeah exactly it's uh so

one one of the one of the conspiracies is that this is because of

diversity equity and inclusion or whatever it is dei shut up right yeah they they changed from woke to dei to dei and uh this is for what this was instigated by the dei mayor of baltimore

i don't

why the hell not man let's just let's all just live in pretend land with a bunch of people i just i want to point out the mayor they said he was dei presumably because he's a black guy yeah right but the city is 62 black so i figured if they had a democracy man if they had a if they had a dei mayor he would be a white guy right

yeah the type of white guy sound logic exactly i i okay so i I don't know.

I mean, this is just sort of, I mean, people just label anything bad that goes wrong as DEI now,

you know, which is like, okay, a plane fell out of the sky.

Well, that's because of DEI or like what else has happened recently.

Yeah, it's very weird to be doing an engineering disasters podcast at a time when the most cynical fascists in the world are trying to weaponize engineering disasters as a thing to make you racist against black people.

There's an earthquake in Taiwan.

That's DEI.

Because, oh, we can't say woke anymore because

there was an eclipse.

That's DEI.

People actually believe that.

I stub my toe.

That's DEI.

It's just a bunch of fascist whining.

Yeah, and it's like, it's a pretty obvious, like, intentional campaign here.

And it started with the fucking airlines, and now it's this.

It's going to keep going until they find their new thing, you know.

Someone's going to say, well, you know, the whole crew of the ship was Indian.

Number one,

ships doing international trade are crewed by people from other countries yeah it's crazy right like i if you this is not some like sudden change in the demographics of the like merchant shipping industry believe me the merchant shipping industry which is like 70 filipino 20 indian and then 10 all others

yeah so i

these are all competent you know yeah crew

there's no doing it all the time for like decades Yeah, I mean, the question of why did the ship lose power is still an open one, but it does not seem to have been anything particularly related to the fact that certain people had a certain skin color.

No, what it was, clearly, there was a Russian guy with the Havana syndrome gun

at the ship's engines.

Yeah, this is the other idea is that, what's his face?

Andrew Tate promoted this.

It was a cyber attack, right?

it wasn't showing

no he's he's very dumb yeah

the idea is okay this was this was a sort of cyber attack right

loses power wildly optimistic uh idea of how networked all of these systems are i was about to say that's a hamster running on a wheel yeah

at some point that has to go to like a marine diesel engine the marine diesel i mean whatever computer it's connected up to is running windows xp at best yes

You know,

I don't know that you could do

a cyber attack that causes a very precise series of events where the ship loses power and then while it's lost power, precisely navigates between the dolphin directly into the bridge pier.

Yeah, that's like a kind of like pool trick shot with your cyber attack, right?

Especially considering one of the things that lost power, as far as we can tell, is the rudder, which

steers the ship.

Another conspiracy is that Obama predicted it in a Netflix film.

This is by far the craziest, so I'm willing to hear it out.

Yeah,

this has something, this has something to do with the cyber attack.

I didn't write many notes here just because it's ridiculous.

I guess there was a some kind of Netflix film that Obama was the producer of about cyber attacks.

This is Obama coming out on your like Netflix, like for you being like, let me be clear, I'm going to collapse the Francis Scott Dee Bridge.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

It's

so it's,

I don't know, maybe Obama did it, maybe he didn't.

I don't know.

I'm not going to pass judgment.

I think it's cool how like

a lot of people have become like

pathologically paranoid about

everything.

You know?

Yes.

Yeah.

Another conspiracy theory is, as always, it was a controlled demolition.

Because I think there's some people who don't believe any structure has fallen down accidentally ever.

Yeah, it's all part of the controlled demolition racket going back to Crassus.

Yes.

Yeah, doing like an Illuminasi wanted shit, except it's like some secret brotherhood of like controlled demolition operators.

I think the thing is this,

if the previous one one overestimated how networked a marine diesel engine was this one overestimates how well every Baltimore area demolition guy can keep a secret.

Yeah, not so good.

They'd be drunk at a bar in Dundalk the next day.

Yeah, you'd be talking about it in a parking lot of Cranbrook Liquors.

I know about fucking Baltimore.

Leave me alone.

Most, most, most controlled demolition guys are pretty excited to tell you about their job.

Just a guy in a fucking Ravens jersey drinking a natimo talking to you about how he demoed the bridge.

It's always like, so you know, that the keeping a secret is very difficult when you're doing really cool stuff,

like clandestinely blowing up a bridge

or

doing 9-11 or whatever.

Whenever the CIA does anything cool, they can barely keep it secret.

They managed to get like a couple of decades out of it, and then all of a sudden you know about like Project Azorian because it's on their web page.

Yeah, exactly.

This is just a website.

It's It's just a

printout that just says we did it and we're not sorry.

Here's a photo of Alan Douglas for you to, Alan Dulles for you to masturbate to.

Yeah, I log on to like caa.gov and my printer just uncommanded print to like full color Alan Dulles.

So it's pretty funny for April 1st, honestly.

It does not seem as though this was any kind of conspiracy or intentional thing as of yet.

Bridge falls down.

Shit happens.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, to some extent, this is shit happens.

I mean, there are some people saying, well, you know,

we shouldn't

say that, you know, this is attributable to any one kind of political ideology or this is attributable to a certain,

you know, conspiracy or whatever.

I do think this was an avertible accident.

I do think that there are reasons why this happened and lessons to be learned.

I don't like the idea of just saying this was just a freak accident and there's nothing we can do.

But it's also, it was not like,

I don't know if this would have been fixed by having communism.

It's one of those things where you can be like, it's not enough to be like, this is a freak accident because that lets people off the hook for like bad decisions and bad systems.

But you can still say this was bad luck, even by the standards of like

extremely bad luck.

I mean, obviously, the real truth is that as they were operating the marine diesel engine, a single Hamas fighter hopped the hatch from a tunnel leading into the engine room and like sabotaged things down there?

By God, is that Hamas's red triangle?

Oh, you never want to see a red triangle over the bridge, Pier.

Yeah, that's not good.

That's not good.

You want to get out of there.

Yeah, the boat didn't even hit it.

It was one guy in like a ski mask and a green headband just like putting an RPG warhead on there and like running away.

Aha, you'll never catch me.

You can catch me at the

bar in FedHill.

I'll be at Mother's.

Do you think the Hamas guys go to bars in Fenthill that often?

Fed Hill?

Yeah, I mean, I would.

I like FedHill.

Got a Hamas Overseas Operations.

Hamas International.

This is like when Archer had to change the name of the agency from ISIS.

My favorite bit of Archer when they had to do that was rolling out the old ISIS logo.

You know, before ISIS brackets reel was a thing, I very nearly had like an ISIS t-shirt from Archer.

And that would have been an awkward moment, you know?

It's like the laundry in somewhere in England that was just called Swasika Laundry.

And then he had explained underneath it was ours first.

Hitler be damned.

Should have kept it.

Should have did the big dick move.

Why should I change?

He's the one that sucks.

Yeah, he's the one that sucks.

So anyway,

let's talk about putting the damn thing back up.

Oh, they're going to build some fucking bullshit, aren't they?

It's probably going to be a cable-stayed bridge.

It's going to be kind of boring.

I'm not a huge fan of how these things look.

I know a lot of people are.

But I'm kind of like, eh, I like a big truss, you know?

So does Lamar Jackson.

Because I think it's once again to Baltimore?

I thought I did, but after 49 days of her as prime minister, I'm not so sure.

Um,

aw, she deserves to suffer.

I just pictured this, right?

At the end of his second term, a 9,000-year-old Biden inaugurating the like American Renaissance Freedom Prosperity Bridge, or whatever.

Can you step away from the lathe for me, please?

And then immediately dropping dead and like crumbling into dust.

Fingers crossed, baby.

Yeah.

So the thing is, however you slice it, this is a long span bridge.

Those things take a long time to engineer and a long time to build.

It's going to be a lot of debate as to exactly how to do this.

You know, the old bridge was functionally obsolete, right?

It was not built to interstate standards, certainly not modern ones.

You need new approaches.

You need to.

Like Santiago Calatrava, the shit.

No, you don't.

Old, old, old Biden opens the bridge, trips and falls off the span.

It slides down because it's made of glass for some reason

dug to the outer harbor just instantly dies of being in that harbor water what if there's gonna be

there's gonna be environmental questions there's gonna be a lot of like a lazarus bath from batman yeah

there's gonna be historic preservation questions because you got the two forts right there there's existing infrastructure nearby you know the high-tension power lines you're gonna have the question of should you build a bridge or should you build a tunnel there's gonna be annoying people like me you're going to ask for public transit lanes on there you know so on and so forth right

sure and it's it's not going to be a quick job it's going to be measured in years not months right biden announced the federal government would pay for it which i think is jumping the gun they should maybe try and get some of that insurance money first

daddy government's just gonna like take over it it's critical like national infrastructure what do you want

uh

we'll get to that um

so uh but luckily the world's smartest and richest man has chimed in.

So, if you reuse the trust steel that fell, says Elon Musk, it could be functioning in three to six months.

The repair should be put to commercial bid with a massive incentive for early and safe completion.

Hey, whoever edits this episode, can you put in that gif of the rocks eggs?

Shut up, bitch.

I like the massive incentive for early and safe completion

to famously like congruent design philosophy.

Yeah, have you tried to build anything in this country?

Good fucking luck, asshole.

Okay, you can do things early and safe.

It's just that

in this case, it might not be worth it.

Anyway, so sent 9:31 p.m.

on March 29th, 2024 from Earth.

Ah, interesting.

I thought Elon was going to Mars.

I'll do that now.

Any day now.

So I was really bored this weekend and found out that people actually believe that reusing the steel to build a new structure quickly is possible because Elon typed it out on Twitter.

So

let's humor them.

What if we reused the steel?

Ooh, material science hour.

All right.

We've had this diagram up before, but I don't know.

Maybe we get some new viewers.

You taught me what Young's modulus does, and I will never forgive you for it.

I'm actually pretty bad whenever I have to host this thing.

This is a stress-strain curve.

This is representative.

We don't have the units marked or anything because it's, you know,

when you have the units, it makes it more irritating because it's harder to point out the different parts that are going on because then everything gets crammed over on one side.

Take a college class.

Yeah, exactly.

Go learn this from a nerd.

Yeah, well, I guess we're jocks.

Yeah, exactly.

Look, I rode in high school.

I was, I, I, I,

I'm jock coated.

Um, are Rowers jocks?

I don't know.

Rowers are definitely jocks.

They're, they're nerdy jocks, though.

They're nerds.

Okay, yeah.

Firmly on the jock side of the spectrum, though.

Yeah.

Jock with nerd characteristics.

Oh, my God.

Tell us about material science, you fucking dweeb.

Yeah.

Dweeb exists perpendicularly to nerd and jock.

I'm going to come over there, beat you to death with your own shoes.

So,

yeah, it doesn't have units.

This chart.

We don't need them at the moment.

Stress is measured in pressure, but it's like PSI or Pascals or whatever the hell people want to use.

Strain is unitless down here.

Strain is the ratio of the length of a piece of material at rest to its length when stressed, right?

So if I have a beam that's a meter long with a strain of 1.01,

that beam under that amount of strain is one meter and one centimeter long, right?

Gotcha.

Yeah.

The way that this is tested, the way these charts are made, essentially we have what's called a coupon, right?

Which is a piece of metal that looks like this, just a flat piece of metal.

And then you have some things that grip on one side, some things that grip on the other side.

And this big, ugly machine.

This big, ugly machine

pulls one side down at a constant rate.

That feels good as hell.

No, it doesn't.

We'll get to that.

Yes, it does, John.

And that's how we increase the strain and measure the stress and not the other way around.

around.

So anyway, as we increase the strain, we go through a period called elastic deformation, right?

That's this part here.

It goes, the strain increases linearly as the stress increases, or rather vice versa, the stress increases as the strain increases.

There's a linear relationship.

And the slope of this line is the Young's modulus, right?

Which is a nice, useful

data point that can tell us a whole lot about how and where to use materials.

But at some point, we hit the yield strength, right?

And the yield strength is where stuff starts to break down.

All of a sudden,

the amount of stress in the material reduces, even though strain is increasing.

And this is because we've gone from elastic deformation, where when the stress is relieved, it goes back down to the original size now as we increase the strain

if you release the stress it goes back in the same line but to a point where it is bigger than before

that is plastic deformation right and this is something that's bad that means you've overstressed the material generally speaking um

there's some times when it's desirable we'll get to that in a second um now we increase the strip the strain from there we start messing with the crystalline structure of the material right the actual like the the how the metal is arranged in a molecular sense this causes something called strain hardening which is essentially we're making it more rigid right yes yeah we did the stuff we like and and it peaks at ultimate strength ultimate strength yeah

strength

now sometimes you you this is desirable you want to do this like at the factory or something when you're when you're making the iron members yeah

the uh the iron foundry stretching things until they reach ultimate yeah that's that's called uh cold forming or cold working um in that case you would ship the thing out after it has been you know de-stressed and um the the piece would have sort of a uh

it

it would return to a different size than when it started out with but you would know that and you could use the material appropriately.

If it happens after you install it,

this is very bad.

You don't want things to be cold formed when you don't want them to be.

I hate when, yeah, you already know the joke.

More about it.

Eventually, yeah, on the 26th of March at 9.31 p.m., a large amount of structural steel was strain-hardened in like a second kind of thing.

Yeah, exactly.

So then we get from strain hardening, we reach the ultimate strength, we go to necking, right?

And necking is when this thing has been pulled apart so far that the cross-section at the middle starts to get smaller and smaller and smaller.

And eventually we get to the point it just breaks in half.

As you do.

Yes.

Fracture.

Yeah,

that's definitely the point where you don't want to be is where it fractures.

So this is, this is how, and this is simplified compared to the real world where, you know, we do this with a machine

on something which is effectively the strain is one-dimensional, right?

When you're in a situation where the bridge has collapsed, all this stuff is happening in three dimensions.

And that becomes a lot more complicated, requires ugly and annoying math like tensors and differential equations, multifariate calculus, finite element analysis, all this crap.

And It's much, much more complicated.

This is just, you know, this is the simplified version.

Thank God.

Never have to learn the complified version.

Exactly, exactly.

The complexified way, yes.

We're doing so good.

Complexificated version.

Conflexificated, yes.

It makes the brain hurt.

Gonna beat you to death with your own shoes.

The important thing here is that the steel has gone past the yield point here, the yield

And if it's for reasons other than intentional cord for cold forming, for the sake of structural purposes, this steel is now trash.

You should not and cannot reuse that.

It's unsafe now because you don't know where on this, sort of, even on the simplified version, where it is on this.

Yes.

Other than it is beyond the boundaries of where you want it to be.

And you can sort of see here, there's a lot of members which have clearly gone through plastic deformation.

All this stuff is bent and busted, and, you know,

it's twisted.

All this stuff has happened.

Some stuff is clearly fractured, right?

Some of this stuff.

It's just dumped in the harbor, which is probably not good for it.

That's also not good for it.

But some of it, okay, you can see this wide flange section here.

That one looks maybe okay.

Maybe we can reuse it, right?

Now, when you think about that, you also have to consider the key bridge stood for 52 years and thus had 52 years of load cycling on it.

Right.

Trucks, cars, millions and millions of trucks.

No, there was no walkway.

Shut up.

Yeah.

These members may have also lost some cross-sectional area due to rust because it was being sprayed with brine constantly.

You know, the steel in general is just old.

It's just old and busted, right?

You can sort of correct this by way of annealing the members, right?

So, okay, hypothetically, we remove all the steel that's okay,

and then we bring it to an enormous oven, and we heat treat it, we anneal it, and it restores the original crystalline structure, right?

Then you graft some plates on there where there was rust and boom, you got a brand new bridge from the old bridge, right?

This is what Elon stands actually believe.

You have one proportion of a new bridge from the old bridge.

Yeah, and I mean, this is the thing is

if we go and salvage all the steel, which is okay to be reused,

you're not going to wind up with a lot of material.

I would venture to say that in your insane quest to reuse the steel, after you spent 20 months extensively testing all the salvage materials to ensure they're usable and then annealing them for reuse, you're going to have thrown out about 99% of them.

Hey, you can have like one beam.

Yeah, you have one beam.

Then you have the problem that this was a functionally obsolete continuous truss bridge.

It does not meet any modern standards.

We don't build continuous trusses really anymore.

The new span is probably going to be cable stayed.

It's probably going to be made of reinforced concrete piers and concrete box skirters, right?

So, you know, if you if you got all these members annealed and you had them, you'd have just a big pile of wide flange beams and hollow structural sections when what you need is rebar and post-tensioning rods, right?

The material is going to be useless.

Just

put like one beam that you've saved at huge cost.

Just like leave it sticking up, you know?

Yeah, and then you could say, look, we were used to it.

Check out this be reused we reused it we reused it shut up now it's the bridge of Theseus yeah that's funny and I guess the uh the other thing is okay well why not recycle it more conventionally which is what they're gonna do all this stuff is gonna get recycled

you melt it down into new material but you know it's not like

they're not going to reuse the same steel right because mild steel is fungible

you know you just you melt down the old steel and you get the new steel from a new location um you don't you know it's like it's like if, I don't know, I went to the bank and I deposited a $20 bill.

If I want to get that $20 bill out,

I don't get the same $20 bill and I can't ask for the same $20 bill.

Yeah, and it's stupid to expect them to because steel doesn't have feelings.

Exactly.

So, you know, if you were like really serious and gung-ho about getting a bridge built really quickly, I mean, you could probably get the new material delivered before the old steel even hit the scrapyard.

Um, you know, so it's it's kind of uh it's kind of like reusing the steel.

The steel will be reused for something, it just won't be the same bridge.

Yeah, it's going to, I don't know, shipping containers or something, shipping containers, uh, musk, you bastards, razor blades.

We're all, you know, uh, porns

under the thumb of big Musk, yeah, yeah.

And then Elon's other big, brilliant idea was uh, offering incentives incentives for rapid completion,

which is going to be standard in any government contract of this nature.

Right.

Yeah.

Thanks, man.

So, yeah.

Thanks for your two cents, Elon.

We've taken it into consideration.

We have

a projection letter that just says, go fuck yourself.

We've built the new bridge out of Cybertruck skin.

Don't do that.

No, no.

The one thing I will say is, okay, if,

if, this is a big if, you really wanted to get a crossing functioning here really quickly and you really needed to.

Pontoon Bridge.

Yeah.

Fuck yes.

This is how you would do it.

Yeah.

Yes.

Yes.

You could, you could do this, but it would be stupid.

I do not care.

No more harbor traffic.

Give it to the Army Corps of Engineers.

Be like, it slides back and forth like a curacao.

Hell yeah.

So

this is a Bailey bridge or a series of Bailey bridges, which are on pontoons.

Bailey bridges were developed in World War II as this very simple steel bridge.

It could be assembled entirely with hand tools and without the aid of a crane.

The one we're looking at here is on pontoons, obviously.

Bailey bridges are used for temporary structures pretty much everywhere.

They're really cheap.

They go together really quick.

Some of them are even in use as basically permanent spans.

They can be long, they can be short, they can be tall, they can be wide or narrow.

They work really good for a lot of applications, right?

It's one of those things that you invented in like World War II that just turned out to be like, we have solved this problem as good as it needs to be completely solved on earth, right?

Like it's done.

Yeah, there's like, there's like, I was researching this just

apparently, there's a lot of companies that have tried to come up with something better than a Bailey Bridge.

And they all like require cranes or some bullshit.

Yeah, just don't bother.

No, we solve the problem.

This is the thing.

Like one guy in an office just like solved a problem for good.

Just to be like, thing is like, this can be assembled by like 20 guys.

They don't need to be able to like read, you know?

Like, yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You can ship it in flat pack.

It's such a like American moment.

I think about this.

I think about the like USS we built this yesterday.

I think about like

bulldozing old planes with like minor faults off of the runways into the jungle because a new one was coming in quicker than you could fix it.

Like

1940s American logistics genuinely still astounds me.

So yeah, we're just gonna...

Bailey Bridge is British.

Oh, fuck.

Even better.

So this was invented by a dude in a shed in 1942.

It was just like, hey, I'm just going to tick this one, tick this box and be like, it's done.

Bridge complete.

So if you're like, we really, really need

this bridge completed real quick.

HMS, we built this yesterday.

It's like, I think plausible you could build a Bailey pontoon bridge across the harbor and you could just say, okay, this middle section we can float out to let ships go through and then float it back in.

You know,

that would be possible.

The real question, though, is

why.

It'd be too cool.

Cool things don't aren't allowed to happen anymore.

Now, here's Baltimore.

Here's the Francis Scott Key Bridge.

Francis Scott Key Bridge is on the Baltimore Beltway.

The Baltimore Beltway, of course, goes all the way around Baltimore.

So that's an alternate route.

There's a harbor tunnel.

There's a Ford McHenry tunnel.

The main purpose from sort of a national context for the Francis Scott Key Bridge was to allow hazardous materials trucks to bypass the harbor tunnels.

Which they can still do by going through the Baltimore northern suburbs.

It just takes a little longer.

The tunnels?

What?

Are they not allowed through the tunnels?

Nah, you can't put hazmat through the tunnels.

No, we can.

Because, again, it would be too cool.

It would be like that one Sylvester Stallone movie.

Yeah, we remember that.

Baltimore has had some bad experiences with hazmat and tunnels.

Yeah.

We'll do that episode at some point.

So

that's pretty much standard on interstate highways, though.

No hazmat in the tunnels.

You know, in Pennsylvania on the turnpike,

they actually make the hazmat trucks exit and then you go up a long winding road up and down the mountain and then they rejoin.

Nice.

Pennsylvania is so fucking cool.

But the thing is, other than the hazmats being essential, sort of this is more important in a local or regional context than a national one.

It

was not a super heavily used crossing.

If you live here in Dundalk and you work in Brooklyn,

it's going to be annoying for a long time, but there's a lot of alternative routes.

I don't think we're about to have like mid-Atlantic traffic chaos because of this.

I think they can afford to spend some time and rebuild this bridge right.

You are more likely to like see a hazmat truck, but that's about it.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, the people in the northern suburbs are all assholes anyway, so I hope they get blown up.

Yeah, it's if I fucking love Baltimore City, hate Baltimore County.

Yep.

Take a strong position here on this.

He's right.

He's right to say it.

I believe it.

And the other thing is: all right, the port is still shut down.

It probably will be for two months.

What happens now?

You know, and the statistic is something like $15 million of lost economic activity a day.

Governor Wes Moore called it a, quote, global crisis, unquote.

There's lots of hemming and hawing.

For most of us, all we might notice is that the car dealership inventory is going to be a little thin for a few months.

No Toyosas.

Yeah.

Fuck.

And some people are going to have delays on their tractor deliveries overseas.

You know, but this is not a situation like the railroad strike where, you know, the grocery stores would have been empty in two weeks.

This is kind of.

We can compensate for this, right?

It's a global crisis, but in a kind of like

manageable way.

The global annoyance.

I guess you can't get up there after the fucking like big landmark fell down and killed like six people and be like, this is annoying.

This is actually like, yeah, this is annoying.

We can tank this one.

Yeah.

Yeah,

we can probably afford to take a little bit of time to do this, right?

You know, our other East Coast ports are able to take up the slack.

There's like lots of generally excess capacity, at least to absorb what needs to be absorbed at this point.

You know, the railroads have started running extra trains.

A lot of these,

I guess, maybe one facility that's getting slammed right now, this is in Norfolk.

There's Lamberts Point, which is, I guess, the only East Coast coal terminal right now.

Um,

but uh,

again, there's there's enough capacity to absorb a lot of these shipments without like

really, really serious delay.

American moment.

Yeah.

And if you're hoping for like chaos and pandemonium that upends the global order, you're going to be disappointed.

Um, I mean, listen, that's kind of already just happened in slow motion anyway.

So I think fucking wait.

You chill.

Can you just be normal?

Yeah, exactly.

I think there's another interesting question.

Are there any other bridges that have similar vulnerabilities?

I can think of two.

One of which is the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.

Notably different from the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel.

This is downstream from the Francis Scott Scott Key Bridge.

This has about a 1,600-foot main span.

If it's downstream of it, like one pilot has the opportunity to do the funniest possible thing.

Yeah, exactly.

You could cause a very severe blockage there.

All those ships that go under Francis Scott Key Bridge also go under the main span of this guy.

There's a little more wiggle room here.

Again, it's 400 feet longer.

I'm not sure the depth of the channel here, whether ships can make it to either of the piers.

You might be able to bonk this.

I am not sure.

Do not try.

Yeah,

exactly.

I mean, this thing is already terrifying to drive over.

Don't make it more terrifying.

It's about 180 feet, and the road deck is three lanes.

It's real weird.

It's not fun.

No shoulder.

Nope.

And one of those lanes is reversible.

Yep.

What?

Yeah.

Do you guys not have that?

No.

I thought it was bad when we introduced like smart motorways, which don't have a shoulder.

No, no.

It's okay.

Imagine you're on a three-lane bridge, speed limit's 60 miles an hour.

There's a Jersey barrier and then just the air.

And

the other two lanes of traffic are coming the other way at 60 miles an hour, and there's no separator between them.

No way.

That's Chesapeake Bay Bridge.

I would worry a lot about that.

It's not fun.

The more I learn to drive, the more scared I get rather than the less, which I think is probably the responsible way of doing it.

But yeah, so this is, I don't know, this is a candidate for replacement soon.

I don't think they're going to replace it.

I believe they're just going to build an additional span.

You know, this is another one of those functionally obsolete bridge, which I think could wind up sustaining a bonk in the future.

And then

the other one, which I think is a little bit worrying,

the Walt Whitman.

Yeah.

They had to close it last week to get the USS New Jersey under that bitch.

This is true.

You could bonk one pier of it, or I guess the middle.

Well, here's the thing about the one pier over here.

The other pier is on land.

But this pier is right at the end of the container dock.

you if you fuck up your like parallel park a bit, then yeah, yeah,

that could be an issue.

You may want to put some armoring around this, you know?

Other than that, I don't know of any other bridges offhand that might be vulnerable to those same problems, but I'm not, I'm not being paid a million dollars to do a study on that.

Probably, probably a lot internationally.

I doubt this is only an American problem, you know?

Yeah, well, especially like the newer container harbors,

they just do not have spans over them at all.

It's all tunneled.

I mean, even like, I mean, even like Hamburg, which is way inland, there's no bridges over that channel.

So, you know,

this is a, by and large, a solved problem, except for certain ports,

which seem to all be in America.

Classic ports.

Yeah, port classic, yeah.

I don't know.

I assume Britain is also lagging behind and is probably vulnerable to something like this just because

we generally assume that we are.

No, no, there's nothing between the ocean and what's it, Felix Town, whatever it is, uh, Felixstowe, Felixstowe.

Yeah, there's there's it, you leave the container port and you're out in the ocean instantly.

Uh, it's there's no bridge, no tunnel, no nothing.

And benefits of being an island, I guess.

Exactly.

Well,

what have we learned?

Uh,

If you're building a bridge over a major shipping channel,

make it pretty big.

Because

you don't want tight clearances in there.

You want a lot of room for error so you don't get bonked.

If the Coast Guard guys start keeping a betting pool, rethink your course of action.

It might take them 50 years, but they will be proven right.

And construction crews working on bridges should be in contact with the Harbor Master.

Yes.

Yes.

Just give them an extra walkie-talkie, you know?

Yeah, exactly.

Give him a walkie-talkie, give him a telephone, give him something.

Well, I do wonder how, like, in this case, just again, with the like bad luck, whether there would have been time, you know, I wouldn't want to be in the middle of a bridge span and be told, like, okay, start sprinting.

Doesn't matter which direction.

Everyone would have piled onto a pickup truck and drove off.

I guess that makes sense.

Yeah.

Well, I forgot the existence of pickup trucks, so I think it's probably a good indication that I'm getting kind of tired.

Yeah, yeah.

So that was, well, there's your problem news brief, which was not that brief.

No.

Also said that's an hour and 45, baby.

Yeah.

Consider yourself informed.

Yeah.

Okay, let's get on to the regular.

No, okay, we're done.

Yeah, I do have a plug before we finish.

If you've listened this far, you probably already know.

We'll put a link in the description as well.

We have a merch store.

You can buy shirts from us all the stuff that we said about fashion about fast fashion about rana plaza uh we are also mercy to these uh like uh currents of like international commerce and so now you can buy shirts from us we try and make them as like ethically as we could uh

you can buy them they're fun uh i will continue to update the t-shirt store when we have a joke that is funny enough to put onto a t-shirt and then you can buy it and you can wear it on your body guaranteed to be as ethical as reasonably possible.

Yeah,

it's as ethical as we take a look at it.

Yeah,

is that it?

I think that's it.

Yeah, bye, everybody.

Bye.

Bye, everyone.